Mount Terminus (23 page)

They haven't just seen them, Simon whispered. They've become them. They don't see what you see. They don't see the flawed technique. They've forgotten where they are, who they are. They've forgotten those are grown men up there, pretending to be something they're not. They only see what
that
man is doing for that
other
man, and it wrenches them in their guts. They don't know it yet, or maybe they'll never know it, but they are the better for it. They'll walk out of the darkness into the light changed people. That, Joseph, is what you do for them. That, right there, is our business, to manufacture emotions, as quickly and as frequently as we can.

I know, said Bloom. It's just …

What?

I see a better way. I see Gottlieb's way. I see it, Bloom said, tapping a finger at his temple, up here, all the time.

Simon stepped close to Bloom and looked at him not unlike the way he had looked so intently at him when they first stood face to face on Mount Terminus, and he said, I know, I know you do.

Then why haven't you allowed me to work with Gottlieb?

I haven't disallowed it.

You haven't encouraged it. You haven't arranged it.

No, said Simon, I haven't. But not because I don't think you're ready.

Why, then?

It's simple mathematics, really. For every picture Gottlieb makes, Abrams makes four, Weiman makes six, Manning eight. And, well, you have been important to each of them. You've made them better at what they do, and I was afraid to give that up, because without them, the studio doesn't run, the theaters don't turn over pictures, and if we don't have pictures to attract new audiences, the waterway doesn't get built, the basin doesn't get developed, families don't buy homes, the rails to town don't get laid, the boulevard doesn't get paved, and we all continue living in a desert, possibly without a business, because, Joseph, I'm all in, well over my head, as deep as can be, I'm drowning in it.

I didn't know.

You didn't need to know. And you don't need to worry about it. Listen, if you want to work with Gottlieb, you should work with Gottlieb. I won't stand in your way. But you have to understand, it's a position you'll need to secure on your own. If I approach him and tell him what a gift you would be to him, he wouldn't trust a word of it. I can mention your interest, but I can't persuade him to do anything he doesn't want to do on his own. Nor would I try.

Why not?

Because Gottlieb is Gottlieb. A special case. His value to me is what I expect your value will be to me one day. He's an inventor, an innovator, in an art form that's at its inception. When he innovates, the members of his crew absorb his innovations—they are transformed by them. When he is great, those who work with him become marginally better. The influence spreads, and that influence, however invisible it might seem to those on the lot, will be the very thing that keeps our studio relevant and profitable in the future. Gottlieb knows this. And he knows I know this. He knows how much I need him, how much I admire him and his pictures. He knows I won't send him packing. So he takes great pleasure in refusing me anything and everything. If this is what you want, you'll need to find a way to do it on your own.

*   *   *

Once a week, for months, Bloom sent Gottlieb an invitation to join him for dinner on the estate. And for months, Gottlieb sent no response in return. Over dinner one evening, he told Simon about having extended these invitations, and Simon told Bloom he had a thought about how he might just attract the elusive Gottlieb to the estate. What's that? asked Bloom. Simon said he would share his idea in return for a small favor. Bloom asked his brother what he needed from him, and Simon said he had some business to discuss with Gerald Stern. He wondered if Bloom wouldn't mind writing a letter on his behalf, telling Stern he had Bloom's permission to contact him. When Bloom asked what was the matter he wanted to discuss with Stern, so he might mention it in his letter, Simon told him it wasn't his affair to speak of. An old friend was in some trouble. He promised to find her an attorney, someone well liked and respected around town. More than that, he wouldn't say, due to the sensitive nature of the woman's predicament. In exchange for his advice, Bloom told his brother he would write the letter that night and put it in the mailbag in the morning. And with that settled, Simon advised the following. Rather than implore Gottlieb to do what you want him to do, he said, entice him with something he'll find too irresistible to ignore.

Which would be what?

Well, I can tell you this: I've recently learned my friend Gottlieb has a deep fascination with historical artifacts. In particular? The type of objects you have on display in the library. That, my dear brother, is your way in.

*   *   *

That evening, Bloom wrote to Stern on behalf of his brother, and after he had spent a sufficient amount of time deliberating how he would word his missive to Gottlieb, he wrote:

Dear Mr. Gottlieb,

In the middle of the first century, a ship belonging to soda traders spread out along the Phoenician shore of the Belus River to prepare a meal of fish stew. They had no stones to support their cooking pots, so they placed lumps of soda from the ship under them, and when these became hot and fused with the sand on the beach, streams of an unknown, translucent liquid flowed … I have treasures to share with you. They are here for you to view at your convenience.

Yours truly,
Joseph Rosenbloom

As with his invitations, his letter received no written response. Some weeks later, however, at the most unexpected time of the morning, something entirely unexpected happened. While he was eating his breakfast in the tower's pavilion, an old nag carrying a man plodded through the front gates. When Bloom looked through his telescope and saw who it was, he asked Elijah, Is it possible? Is it him?

He looked again. It was him. It was most certainly him. Up the long drive rode the disheveled Elias Gottlieb, who, at that moment, was hunched over his seat in such a way he appeared to have taken ill. It soon became apparent to Bloom he was leaning over the old plug's neck to whisper something in its ear—words of encouragement, perhaps? This, followed by a loving rub of its hoary mane. Having seen the intimate moment shared between man and beast, the worry and anticipation Bloom felt about engaging this artist he so much admired, the man he had so long been waiting to meet, was to some extent eased. Here, he tried to convince himself, was a good man, a man from whom he had nothing to fear. Hardly the
creature
Mr. Abrams insisted he was.

Bloom was moved to call out and greet Mr. Gottlieb, but when he was about to speak, he reconsidered; he thought it more prudent to wait, to watch. Of course! He would allow Meralda the opportunity to greet their guest. She would, after all, enjoy escorting him inside. Take his hat and coat. Offer him some sweet morsel she had baked that morning. I don't want to appear too eager, he said to Elijah. Overly zealous is not attractive. And so Bloom looked on while the great Elias Gottlieb, the unequaled Elias Gottlieb, tied his horse to the hitching post beside the service entrance and made his way inside. Bloom, meanwhile, stood in the sanctuary of his aviary long enough for Meralda to have engaged their visitor with small talk, to offer him her small kindnesses. He then began his descent. He rounded the first turn in the stairwell and then the second, and when he reached the second-story landing, a horrible sound, a most unsettling and unwelcome sound, rose up to meet him. It was a moan, a bellowing, gut-wrenching moan, punctuated by a sharp jag of sobs. No, he said. No no no. Not now. Bloom halted and listened, hoped his loving cook would regain her composure … But no. The noise repeated and reverberated upward through the hollow shaft. Only after he came to the conclusion that the noise was not likely to stop did he proceed down, slowly, apprehensively, and when he eventually reached the bottom of the stairs, he peeked through the kitchen door to see Meralda's shaking shoulders. She stood before the butcher block with her back to the window, in front of which two skinned rabbits hung from strings by their necks, and, to Bloom's dismay, he discovered, clenched to her chest, was Mr. Gottlieb's bearded cheek. Bloom had never noticed when he caught distant glimpses of Gottlieb on the studio lot what a diminutive figure he was—he always appeared to him larger than life, but even when wearing a pair of lifts and standing with a straight back, as he did today, Bloom was surprised to see his face reach only as high as Meralda's bosom. Presently, one lens of his spectacles was buried in soft flesh, while the other magnified an amber eye, bemused in its expression, as if it were looking off to some distant horizon in search of a train. When Mr. Gottlieb's eye caught sight of Bloom arrested at the doorway, the tufted brow residing on his forehead lifted into an arch, at which point Mr. Gottlieb motioned with a hand for the young Rosenbloom to come closer, and when Bloom had done so, Gottlieb rolled his visible eye to the countertop, where Bloom saw what it was that had upset Meralda enough to grab hold of this perfect stranger in the same manner she had so often embraced him when he stood at Mr. Gottlieb's height. There before Meralda was a third hare, its belly sliced open, its viscera neatly piled beside its head, and at its feet lay a dozen miniature rabbits, each the size of a small toe.

In a voice muffled by the buffer of Meralda's chest, the little man said with a crushed smile, Come come. Come, do away with them so I might catch my breast—breath! for God's sake—so I might catch my breath. The hand that was consoling Meralda's flank, he now used to thumb Bloom over to the counter. Please, he said, she is mightier than she appears. His hand returned to comforting Meralda, who was lost to the world she joined when she disappeared from this one. Bloom edged closer to the counter, on which he could see more clearly how carefully she had washed the litter clean and how respectfully she had arranged it. Side by side each unfinished body lay next to its sibling, very calm, very serene, as if they had been prepared for burial by the hand of a skilled mortician.

Go on, said Gottlieb. Out of sight.

Bloom gathered the lifeless bodies into his shirtfront and, proceeding as if the small nuggets were still alive and could feel every movement he made, he walked out the service entrance onto the drive with his vision focused on the creases of the unborn eyes, on the folds of tender skin, expecting at any moment for the eyes to awaken, for the limbs to wriggle. His attention was so narrow in this instance, he was unaware of what stood in his path. He was so concentrated, he didn't see, obstructing his route to the front gardens, the ass of the old nag Gottlieb had ridden in on. With his eyes mesmerized by the sunlight illuminating the capillaries under the rabbits' vellum skin, he collided with the horse's backside with enough momentum that he spilled from his shirt the stillborn litter. It scattered onto the gravel, and as soon as it did, the horse rocked forward, and when it stepped back to right itself, it moved side to side as would an old drunk set off balance, and it proceeded to crush onto the stones with each clumsy step of its brittle hooves the entire brood, and at that moment, Bloom, who had been knocked on his back from the concussion against the nag's ass, heard from behind him a basso profundo guffaw, which, like Elias Gottlieb's eyebrows and nose, belonged to a fuller, taller, more prodigious man. The resonance struck Bloom as would a clap of thunder. So foreign and contagious was the sound of Gottlieb's laugh, Bloom felt forming deep inside him, in the deepest region of his innards, a laugh so sustaining when it reached the narrow passage of his throat, it hurt upon eruption from his body, and once it began he couldn't make it stop—it possessed him. For more time than could be considered dignified, he made a spectacle of himself. He rolled around on the gravel, pounding his fist on the small stones until he felt tears running down his cheeks.

*   *   *

Your brother tells me you and I are kindred spirits, said Gottlieb as Bloom upturned some earth under the purple-hued shade of a bloomed jacaranda. He spoke with a pipe lodged in the corner of his mouth. The smoke departing his lips curdled into the kinks of his mustache and hung in the nostrils of a nose whose bulbous tip was shaped like the bent-over buttocks of a well-fed woman. He thinks you're
something
, Gottlieb said of Bloom's brother.

But you don't believe him.

And why should I? He's a typical
macher.
Like all
macher
moneymen, if a man can earn him a dollar, this is enough to make him
something
.

He saw something in you once, didn't he?

He saw a helpless, desperate man wandering the desert without shoes and water. He thought I had an
intriguing face
. His words, said Gottlieb,
intriguing face
. He wanted to put it in a picture. As a destitute man dying of thirst in a wasteland, who was I to deny him the pleasure of putting this
intriguing face
of mine anywhere he desired?

Bloom looked up from his hole and at Mr. Gottlieb's features. There was a feral quality to Gottlieb's appearance. He was broad in the forehead, the bones of his cheeks protruded into a narrowing curve, and his chin—Bloom could see under the thick growth of his beard—formed at an acute angle, and he felt himself nodding in agreement with his brother's assessment. It
is
an intriguing face, he said to Gottlieb.

Let's not kid ourselves. It's the face of the primordial wood. Had I been born with haunches and a tail, if I cantered off in search of a glade after my mother deposited me onto the earth, it would have come as a surprise to no one.

Bloom smiled at this. It's a handsome face.

Gottlieb shrugged. It's a face. Gottlieb watched Bloom fill the hole he'd dug for the remains of the litter. The young Rosenbloom placed the crushed bodies inside the opening, and with the trowel he had used to dig the small grave, covered them over with clods of dirt. When he had patted down the mound, Gottlieb pushed his back off the smooth bark of the tree and walked out from under its shadows in the direction of the courtyard. Bloom left his father's old tool on top of the tiny grave and took to Gottlieb's side. Now tell me, said the man, who gave you the brains to write those words in your last note?